I was in the room when he started typing this - I walked into YC that day to be met by PG bubbling with delight about how Etherpad had implemented playback and he was about to try it out. He was like a little kid about to get a birthday present. IIRC, he wanted it so he could see how he actually writes.
I watched over his shoulder for a little while, but it feels intrusive to be standing there breathing down someone's neck while they think and write, and hey, I could just play it back later, so I left.
Memory is fallible after so much time but I think he told me later that he wouldn't keep using it because he was so used to vi. I want to add that he was going to try to get the Etherpad guys to implement vi shortcuts but that feels suspiciously like the sort of embellishment that creeps into a story years later.
If you mean recorded commands, those are stored in registers, which from a quick look at the source [1] seem to just contain strings. So I would imagine their length is only bounded by memory.
So I suppose you could just qq, write your entire thing, then "qp to get the whole history. I wonder if there's a tool that replays commands in slow motion, or some neat way to add sleeps to a command sequence.
Ha! I once saw PG writing an essay at his home and he told me what it was about, then when it came out it was so radically different that it felt like not much must have remained. But I didn’t watch long because it does feel intrusive watching someone write. It’s like you’re reading their mind.
> ... He was like a little kid about to get a birthday present. IIRC, he wanted it so he could see how he actually writes.
Was that the intent of the feature, or something else?
It seems like this might be coupled to some kind of teaching program that helps you become a more efficient writer. Maybe something that could recap your session and offer a focused lesson on, say writing a paragraph from a prompt.
I watched over his shoulder for a little while, but it feels intrusive to be standing there breathing down someone's neck while they think and write, and hey, I could just play it back later, so I left.
Memory is fallible after so much time but I think he told me later that he wouldn't keep using it because he was so used to vi. I want to add that he was going to try to get the Etherpad guys to implement vi shortcuts but that feels suspiciously like the sort of embellishment that creeps into a story years later.